A catheterization laboratory, or cath lab, is an examination room in a hospital that provides the equipment to perform medical procedures that require the insertion of a catheter into a patient's arteries. Typical procedures in a cath lab include intravascular imaging, which can be used to detect vulnerable plaque in a patient's arteries before the onset of a stroke or heart attack. Cath labs also provide the equipment to treat hardened and narrowed arteries by coronary angiography—a procedure in which a doctor uses a catheter to deliver a stent or balloon to open up a narrowed artery and prevent a stroke or heart attack.
In all of these procedures, medical imaging equipment such as x-ray angiography, intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), or optical coherence tomography (OCT) systems can be used to help a doctor look at the affected arteries. Unfortunately, these imaging systems by their nature can impose some limits on the availability of cath labs.
Typical cath lab imaging systems generate large three-dimensional data sets that must be processed by high-powered computers to provide useful images. The amount of processing power required to work with the high resolution 3D images that enable plaque detection and angiographic intervention goes well beyond what is offered by typical desktop computers. Since each imaging system requires an expensive, high-powered computer, building a cath lab is a very expensive undertaking. Due to the expense required for a cath lab, some large hospitals may only build one or none, even where several are called for, and some smaller clinics may go without a cath lab entirety.